He was a longtime collaborator with Shakespeare in the Park founder Joseph Papp, partnering with him on some of the Shakespeare Festival's first productions at an outdoor amphitheatre on Manhattan's Lower East Side, including Julius Caesar and The Taming Of The Shrew in 1956. The next year, when the Festival moved to a temporary stage in Central Park, Vaughan directed Two Gentlemen Of Verona, Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth.

Mr. Vaughan served as the artistic director of the Phoenix Theater in New York and the founding artistic director of the Seattle Repertory Theatre and the Repertory Theatre New Orleans.

He was awarded with honorary doctorates from Rowan University and Indiana State University and taught at Harvard University and other colleges. Mr. Vaughan was a member of the Actors Studio. In 1978 he and his wife, Anne Thompson Vaughan, founded the New Globe Theatre, Inc. to tour classical productions to the college/university/art center circuit.

He wrote the plays Assassination 1965, Ghost Dance and The Royal Game; the textbook "Directing Plays: A Working Professional's Method"; a professional memoir, "A Possible Theater"; and the historical novel "Captives, 1677."